Carlos Mencia

The last time we laughed at Carlos Mencia, we were at his doomed Mexican food restaurant Maggie Rita's. (The menu was truly giggle-worthy.) The eatery quickly went down in flames, but Mencia, who does a good job of dishing out plenty of abuse onstage, didn't shy away from the hoopla. During his stand-up act, Mencia routinely ridicules racial minorities, gays, women, the obese and the mentally ill, so it was good to see him unashamedly take it on the chin over the Rita fiasco. Of course, he's had plenty of practice being publicly criticized. The Wall Street Journal, that bastion of all things ha-ha, once called Mencia one of the least funny comedians of all time. (The WSJ just isn't his crowd.) And he's been openly accused of lifting material from other comics like George Lopez and Bill Cosby. (Mencia has denied the charges, saying, with his typical ungrammatical eloquence, ''The reason why these rumors got started is that I don't really contest them, because I don't believe they deserve contesting.'') When it comes to political correctness, comics don’t get much more inappropriate than Mencia, and his audience loves him for it.